History of the Peloponnesian War

Thucydides

Thucydides, Vol. 1-4. Smith, Charles Foster, translator. London and Cambridge, MA: Heinemann and Harvard University Press, 1919-1923.

At any rate after this he gave his own daughter Archedice in marriage to Aeantides son of Hippocles, tyrant of Lampsacus—an Athenian to a Lampsacene!—perceiving that this family had great influence with King Darius. And there is at Lampsacus a monument of her bearing this inscription:[*](Ascribed to Simonides of Ceos (Aristotle, Rhet. i. 9).)

  1. This dust covers Archedice daughter of Hippias,
  2. Who was foremost in Hellas among the men of his time:
  3. Her father and husband, her brothers and children were tyrants,
  4. Yet was not her mind lifted up to vainglory.
Hippias, however, after being tyrant for three years more at Athens, was then deposed[*](510 B.C.) in the fourth year by the Lacedaemonians and the exiled Alcmaeonidae, and retired under truce to Sigeium, from there to Aeantides at Lampsacus, and thence to the court of King Darius;

whence twenty years later, being already an old man, he went with the Persians on the expedition to Marathon.

With these events in mind and recalling all that they knew of them by report, the Athenian people were in an ugly temper at this time and suspicious towards those who had incurred blame in the matter of the mysteries; and the whole thing seemed to them to have been done in connection with a conspiracy that aimed at an oligarchy or a tyranny.

So when, in consequence of their anger on this account, many noteworthy men were already imprisoned and there seemed to be no end of the matter, but day by day they were growing more savage and still more men were being arrested, then at last one of the men in confinement,[*](The orator Andocides, who gives his account of the matter in his speech De Mysteriis. The man who persuaded him was, according to Andocides, his cousin Charmides; according to Plutarch (Alcib. ii,), it was Timaeus.) the one in fact who was regarded as the most guilty, was persuaded by one of his fellow-prisoners to make a confession, which may have been true or not; for there are conjectures both ways, but no one has been able, either then or afterwards, to tell the truth with reference to those who did the deed.